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His tow-pate through the rainbow panes
Whack! whack! a stalwart musket brains
That too precocious poppy head;
Its opiate seeds and milk juice scatters,
The hollow capsule cleaves and shatters,
Coating the walls a creamy red.
Or, if some prattling infant, crying,
Clung to your knees, its mother dying,
Shot through the womb, the babe to seize,
What joy! the dimpling legs to squeeze,
Then, grasping firmly by the heels,
And gloating o’er its piteous squeals,
To whirl it sling-like round your shoulders
And dash its brains out on the boulders!
What a hushed silence then succeeds
As the smashed corpselet throbs and bleeds,
A carrion man, a shattered nought,
Once palpitating life and thought.
Oh! Sixteen-twenty! glorious flint-age!
Faith’s climacteric! human vintage!
Better than thine, O famed Grumello!
Of purpling vines and clusters mellow,
Now mantling o’er thy rock Tarpeian
And castles’ mouldering battlements,
Screening its lizard-haunted rents!
Then from thy crenelled fastness swung
The purpling heretic, from lung
Apostate tortured cries were rent
And through the blood-damp air were spent
Wind-wafted to the empyrean.
Then all thy splintered precipice
Ran crude with human sacrifice,
